(From the Third
Edition of A First Look at Communication Theory
by Em Griffin, Ó 1997,
McGraw-Hill, Inc. This text-only version of the article appears on the
World Wide Web site www.afirstlook.com. The text version does not
contain any figures. A facsimile of the original article, which includes
all figures, is also available in PDF format.)

Chapter 18

Groupthink

of Irving Janis

On the morning of
January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger blasted off from
the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Seventy-three seconds later,
millions of adults and school children watched on television as the
rocket disintegrated in a fiery explosion, and the capsule plunged into
the Atlantic Ocean. The death of all seven crew members, and
particularly teacher Christa McAuliffe, shocked the nation. For many
Americans, the Challenger disaster marked the end of a love
affair with space. As they learned in the months that followed, the
tragedy could have been—should have been—avoided.

President Reagan
immediately appointed a select commission to determine the probable
cause(s) of the accident. The panel heard four months of testimony from
NASA officials, rocket engineers, astronauts, and anyone else who might
have knowledge about the failed mission. In a five-volume published
report, the presidential commission identified the primary cause of the
accident as a failure in the joint between two stages of the rocket that
allowed hot gases to escape during the ‘‘burn." Volatile rocket fuel
spewed out when a rubber O-ring failed to seal the joint.

The average
citizen could understand the mechanics of the commission’s finding.
After all, everyone knows what happens when you pour gasoline on an open
flame. What people found difficult to fathom was why NASA had launched
the Challenger when there was good reason to believe the
conditions weren’t safe. In addition to the defective seal, the
commission also concluded that a highly flawed decision process was an
important contributing cause of the disaster. Communication, as well as
combustion, was responsible for the tragedy.

The Challenger
Launch: A Model of Defective Decision Making

As the person in
charge of the Flight Readiness Review for NASA, Jesse Moore had the
ultimate authority to approve or scrub the shuttle mission. He relied on
the assessments of managers at the Kennedy, Johnson, and Marshall Space
Centers, who in turn consulted with engineers from the companies that
designed the Challenger’s subsystems. The film Apollo 13
dramatized the final phase of this ‘‘go/no-go" launch procedure.1 NASA
has always taken the position that ‘‘a launch should be canceled if
there is any doubt of its safety."2

The day before
the launch, Morton Thiokol engineers warned that the flight might be
risky. As the team responsible for the performance of the rocket
booster, they worried about the below-freezing temperature that was
forecast for the morning of the launch. The O-ring seals had never been
tested below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and as Thiokol engineer Roger
Boisjoly later testified, getting the O-rings to seal gaps with the
temperature in the 20s was like ‘‘trying to shove a brick into a crack
versus a sponge."3

The O-ring seals
had long been classified a critical component on the rocket motor, ‘‘a
failure point—without back-up—that could cause a loss of life or vehicle
if the component failed."4 Yet when Thiokol engineers raised the safety
issue in a teleconference, NASA personnel discounted their concerns and
urged them to reconsider their recommendation. After an off-line caucus
with company executives, Thiokol engineers reversed their ‘‘no-go"
position and announced that their solid rocket motor was ready to fly.
When the Kennedy, Johnson, and Marshall Space Center directors later
certified that the Challenger was flight ready, they never
mentioned any concern about the O-rings. At the top of the flight
readiness review chain, Jesse Moore had every reason to believe that the
shuttle was ‘‘A-OK."

Irving Janis,
Yale social psychologist, was fascinated with the question of how an
acknowledged group of experts could make such a terrible decision. He
was convinced that their grievous error wasn’t an isolated instance
limited to NASA decisions, corporate boardrooms, or matters of a
technical nature. He believed he could spot the same group dynamic at
work in other tragic decisions. He was especially interested in White
House fiascos—Roosevelt’s complacency before Pearl Harbor, Truman’s
invasion of North Korea, Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, Johnson’s
escalation of the Vietnam War, Nixon’s Watergate break-in, and Reagan’s
Iran-Contra scandal coverups. If Janis were alive today he would
probably also examine Clinton’s approval of the raid on the Branch
Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Janis didn’t regard chief executives
or their advisors as stupid, lazy, or evil. Rather, he saw them as
victims of ‘‘groupthink."

Groupthink: A
Concurrence-Seeking Tendency

Janis originally
defined groupthink as ‘‘a mode of thinking that people engage in
when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’
strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically
appraise alternative courses of action."5 According to his definition,
groupthink occurs only when cohesiveness is high. It requires that
members share a strong ‘‘we-feeling" of solidarity and desire to
maintain relationships within the group at all costs. When colleagues
operate in a groupthink mode, they automatically apply the ‘‘preserve
group harmony" test to every decision they face."6

Janis pictured
this kind of group as having a ‘‘warm clubby atmosphere." This
description captures the image a minority businessman had in mind when a
friend asked him what clubs he would like to join when racial
integration became a reality. His answer: ‘‘Only one. I’d like to be
part of the ‘good ole boys club.’ That’s where the ‘insider’ deals are
made."7

Most students of
group process regard members’ mutual attraction to each other as an
asset. Marvin Shaw, a University of Florida psychologist and the author
of a leading text in the field, states this conviction in the form of a
general hypothesis that has received widespread research support:
‘‘High-cohesive groups are more effective than low-cohesive groups in
achieving their respective goals."8 But Janis consistently held that the
‘‘superglue" of solidarity that bonds people together often causes their
mental process to get stuck:

The
more amiability and esprit de corps among members of a policy-making
in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking
will be replaced by groupthink. . . . The social constraint consists of
the members’ strong wish to preserve the harmony of the group, which
inclines them to avoid creating any discordant arguments or schisms.9

Janis was
convinced that the concurrence-seeking tendency of close-knit groups can
cause them to make inferior decisions.

Symptoms of
Groupthink

What are the
signs that group loyalty has caused members to slip into a groupthink
mentality? Janis listed eight symptoms that show that concurrence
seeking has led the group astray. The first two stem from overconfidence
in the group’s prowess. The next pair reflect the tunnel vision members
use to view the problem. The final four are signs of strong conformity
pressure within the group. I’ll illustrate many of the symptoms with
quotes from the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space
Shuttle Challenger Disaster.10

1.Illusion of Invulnerability. Despite the launchpad fire
that killed three astronauts in 1967 and the close call of Apollo 13,
the American space program had never experienced an in-flight fatality.
When engineers raised the possibility of catastrophic O-ring blow-by,
NASA manager George Hardy nonchalantly pointed out that this risk was
‘‘true of every other flight we have had." Janis summarizes this
attitude as ‘‘everything is going to work out all right because we are a
special group."11

2.Belief in Inherent Morality of the Group. Under the sway
of groupthink, members automatically assume the rightness of their
cause. At the hearing, engineer Brian Russell noted that NASA managers
had shifted the moral rules under which they operated: ‘‘I had the
distinct feeling that we were in the position of having to prove that it
was unsafe instead of the other way around."

3. Collective
Rationalization. Despite
the written policy that the O-ring seal was a critical failure point
without backup, NASA manager George Hardy testified that ‘‘we were
counting on the secondary O-ring to be the sealing O-ring under the
worst case conditions." Apparently this was a shared misconception. NASA
manager Lawrence Mulloy confirmed that ‘‘no one in the meeting
questioned the fact that the secondary seal was capable and in position
to seal during the early part of the ignition transient." This
collective rationalization supported a mindset of ‘‘hear no evil, see no
evil, speak no evil."12

4.Out-group Stereotypes. Although there is no direct
evidence that NASA officials looked down on Thiokol engineers, Mulloy
was caustic about their recommendation to postpone the launch until the
temperature rose to 53 degrees. He reportedly asked whether they
expected NASA to wait until April to launch the shuttle.

5.Self-Censorship. We now know that Thiokol engineer George
McDonald wanted to postpone the flight. But instead of clearly stating
‘‘I recommend we don’t launch below 53 degrees," he offered an equivocal
opinion. He suggested that ‘‘lower temperatures are in the direction of
badness for both O-rings. . . ." What did he think they should do? From
his tempered words, it’s hard to tell.

6.Illusion of Unanimity. NASA managers perpetuated the
fiction that everyone was fully in accord on the launch recommendation.
They admitted to the presidential commission that they didn’t report
Thiokol’s on-again/off-again hesitancy with their superiors. As often
happens in such cases, the flight readiness review team interpreted
silence as agreement.

7.Direct Pressure on Dissenters. Thiokol engineers felt
pressure from two directions to reverse their ‘‘no-go" recommendation.
NASA managers had already postponed the launch three times and were
fearful the American public would regard the agency as inept.
Undoubtedly that strain triggered Hardy’s retort that he was ‘‘appalled"
at Thiokol’s recommendation. Similarly, the company’s management was
fearful of losing future NASA contracts. When they went off-line for
their caucus, Thiokol’s senior vice president urged Roger Lund, vice
president of engineering, to ‘‘take off his engineering hat and put on
his management hat."

8.Self-Appointed Mindguards. ‘‘Mindguards" protect a leader
from assault by troublesome ideas. NASA managers insulated Jesse Moore
from the debate over the integrity of the rocket booster seals. Even
though Roger Boisjoly was Thiokol’s expert on O-rings, he later bemoaned
that he ‘‘was not even asked to participate in giving input to the final
decision charts."

It Doesn’t Always
Happen / It’s Not Always Bad

Janis introduced
the concept of groupthink through the popular press in 1971.13 The idea
struck a responsive chord with policy planners who had hastily approved
courses of action that just as quickly turned out to be major blunders.
The term groupthink paralleled the ominous expression
doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984, and it immediately
caught on among business and government leaders as a catch-all term to
refer to any ill-conceived group plan. In later extensions of his
theory, Janis emphasized that not all bad decisions are the result of
groupthink, and not all cases of groupthink end up failing.

Figure 18.2
diagrams Janis’s extended theory of groupthink. The boxes on the left
lay out the preconditions for a concurrence-seeking tendency to emerge
and the boxes on the right show the path the group takes when groupthink
is present.

Box A shows that
cohesiveness is a major contributor to groupthink. Yet even though Janis
regarded groups that are highly attractive to members as especially
prone to making bad policy decisions, he didn’t believe that all
cohesive groups end up succumbing to groupthink. Cohesiveness is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for excessive
concurrence-seeking.

The likelihood of
groupthink increases when there are structural faults within the
organization (box B-1) and the policy decision has to be made during a
time of high stress and low self-esteem (box B-2). The secret of
short-circuiting the process lies in altering the factors in the B boxes
that act as catalysts in cohesive groups. The items that a wise leader
can change are the first three in box B-1, concerning insulation of the
group, lack of impartial leadership, and lack of procedural norms.

Because a
close-knit group at the top of an organization is insulated from outside
opinions, Janis suggested breaking up into subgroups that work
simultaneously on the same issue. Each subgroup can draw on the
expertise of trusted subordinates who are encouraged to give their
advice freely.

Leaders climb to
the top by being ‘‘take-charge" people. Unfortunately, the very force of
personality that placed them in authority can have a chilling effect on
group candor. Some leaders are able to lead an impartial discussion
without imposing their opinions, but Janis’s prescription for open
inquiry is to have the leader periodically leave the group so that
members will feel free to express their personal views.

Since many groups
have no set procedures to ensure close scrutiny of favored solutions,
Janis recommended assigning the role of critical evaluator to every
member. Instead of representing his or her own constituency or narrow
area of expertise, each participant would take responsibility for the
entire plan. Of course, a leader’s request for critical comments is a
hollow exercise if he or she shows irritation or cuts off debate when
the group starts to carve up a cherished idea.

If these measures
fail, we can spot the presence of groupthink by its observable effects
listed on the right side of Figure 18.2. We’ve already looked at the
symptoms of groupthink in box C. Janis claimed that these inevitably
lead to the seven flawed procedures cataloged in box D. Does all this
automatically produce a ruinous outcome like the Challenger
disaster? Not necessarily. Groups that do everything wrong may luck out
from time to time. There are also many routine occasions when a
groupthink mode is actually helpful because it makes for a speedy and
amicable consensus on issues of minor importance. But according to
Janis, when a group confronts a great threat or a grand opportunity,
concurrence-seeking almost always produces an inferior solution.

Participant-Observation of Groupthink in Action . . . Or Was It?

Groupthink
researchers typically identify a grievous case of poor decision making
like the Challenger disaster and then comb through historical
records to see if the theory applies. Janis warned against jumping to
conclusions on the basis of just a few signs. He had to spot all or most
of the symptoms before he would make a diagnosis of groupthink. In the
following pages I outline the events leading up to a crucial boardroom
decision that could cost a charity up to one million dollars. As I
sketch the events that led to this fiasco, see how many of the eight
symptoms of groupthink (box C) and the seven symptoms of defective
decision making (box D) are evident. Did the virus of groupthink infect
an otherwise healthy body?

The Grand
Opportunity. For
the past ten years I’ve served on the board of directors of a Christian
nonprofit organization committed to serving kids raised in poverty.14 A
longtime benefactor offered to donate a half-million dollars if we could
match his gift. In the world of charitable giving, big gifts like this
are typically used to leverage other contributions. He also urged us to
place the funds for six months with the Foundation for New Era
Philanthropy in Philadelphia, which promised to pair our gift with that
of an anonymous megabuck donor. After six months we’d end up with a
total of two million dollars to start a camp for inner-city kids. For
their part, New Era would get the interest from our million-dollar
principal to use for the expenses of running a foundation. And the
anonymous donor would have the satisfaction of stimulating others to be
generous, yet she or he wouldn’t have the hassle of dealing with daily
requests for money.

The Decision. Our
initial reaction was similar to the treasurer of the University of
Pennsylvania: ‘‘It sounds too good to be true, and it’s got all the
earmarks of a Ponzi scheme."15 Yet his school and most of our sister
agencies were already in the program. Since our benefactor urged us to
place his funds with New Era, we thought we should at least check it
out.

We formed a
committee to perform ‘‘due diligence," the legal term for the kind of
vigilant investigation Janis encouraged. A lawyer, a money manager, and
a partner in one of the Big Six accounting firms spent two months
gathering a thick batch of financial records, tax returns, and
references. Although I wasn’t on the research team, I had three
hour-long phone conversations with friends in Philadelphia who knew Jack
Bennett, the founder and CEO of New Era.

What did we find?
The good news was that people we knew intimately trusted Jack Bennett
implicitly. Money sent to New Era was always matched dollar for dollar
six months later. Not one charity had lost a dime; to the contrary, for
every dime they invested, they now had twenty cents.

The bad news was
that we could learn nothing about New Era’s anonymous million dollar
donors. Only Bennett knew their names, and he warned that any group that
pressed him for their identity would no longer be eligible for a
matching grant. Wealthy board members who were giving freely had no
trouble believing that such megabuck donors existed. They said that if
they had vast resources, they would do the same. The difference was just
a matter of scale. During a break in our deliberations, one of these
members pulled me aside and confided, ‘‘Em, this is so big that there
are only six or seven people around the country who’d be willing and
able to put up that kind of money. I think I know who four of the
mystery donors are."

After ten hours
of lively discussion spanning a three-week period, we decided to take
the plunge. I wish I could say that I was a prophetic voice denouncing
the folly of my colleagues, but I wasn’t. (Another member and I did
insist that we only use money from our contributors who gave us written
approval to place their funds in the risky venture.) Amidst much
soul-searching, I voted to send the money to New Era for the matching
grant. I thought it was worth the risk.

The Reality. New
Era was the front page story of The Wall Street Journal for the
entire week of May 15–19, 1995. On successive days the paper reported
that New Era was in financial trouble, that Jack Bennett now admitted
there were no anonymous donors, and that New Era was bankrupt with
obligations of over a half billion dollars to three hundred
nonprofits and individual contributors. I personally felt shock, shame,
and incredibly stupid. By the end of the week the Journal asked,

Why did so many
smart people entrust [Bennett] with so much money on so little evidence
regarding his background and with so many red flags flying over his
double-your-money program?16

A good question.
To what extent is groupthink the answer?

The Assessment. The
volunteer board of our organization is a prime example of the cohesive
in-group with a warm clubby atmosphere that Janis described. Most
members are white male business executives. We’re encouraged to bring
our spouses to the meetings, and as couples we enjoy the nonagenda times
together. I’ve never talked with an ex-director who didn’t want to be
asked back.

The small world
of charitable giving has the same cozy feel. As fund-raisers know,
$100,000 gifts are made on the basis of long-term personal
relationships. Due to interlocking directorships, when organizations
undertook their ‘‘due diligence," on New Era, they were in effect
talking to themselves and other members of the in-group. It took an
outsider—a South African accounting instructor at a small liberal arts
college—to blow the whistle on the whole scam.17

In terms of
Janis’s symptoms of defective decision making (box D), two items stand
out. Our board showed a selective bias in processing the information
that we gathered by interpreting New Era’s flawless payout history as
evidence that the plan was legitimate. Instead, it was the classic mark
of a well-conceived pyramid swindle. We also failed to work out
contingency plans. Although we joked darkly about New Era being a Ponzi
scheme, I don’t think we ever discussed what we’d do if it were.

On the other
hand, the decision was no rush to judgment. In his book Crucial
Decisions, Janis characterizes defective decision making as
‘‘premature closure,"18 a label that certainly doesn’t describe our
board process. After two months of seeking every scrap of information we
could get, we vigorously discussed the relative merits of each option,
and worked to create new options. At no point did I feel that our
leadership tried to impose a solution or close out debate. I sensed,
rather, a desire for more creative input and a hesitancy to act on the
take-it-or-leave-it proposition that New Era offered.

There’s no doubt
that we made a horrendous mistake with tragic consequences. But the
question still remains, Was this groupthink? As you decide, consider
that 115 supposedly savvy individuals, including former Secretary of the
Treasury William Simon and philanthropist Lawrence Rockefeller, reached
the same decision without benefit or curse of group involvement. Also
remember that Jack Bennett conned 185 other nonprofits into sending
money for the supposed match. Janis never suggested that groupthink was
a mass phenomenon. Is it likely that a concurrence-seeking tendency
explains why all of these groups were taken in? Wishful thinking,
excessive trust, or a ‘‘greed to do good" seem to be equally powerful
and vastly simpler explanations.

Critique: Avoiding
Uncritical Acceptance of Groupthink

Janis calls for
greater critical assessment of proposals lest they be adopted for
reasons other than merit. Since his description of groupthink has
received great popular approval—perhaps because we’re fascinated with
colossal failure, it seems only fair to note that efforts to validate
the theory have been sparse and not particularly successful.

Most students of
groupthink pick a high-profile case of decision making where things went
terribly wrong and then use Janis’s model as a cookie cutter to analyze
the disaster—much as I’ve done with the Challenger and New Era.
They seem to take the existence of groupthink for granted and employ the
theory to warn against future folly or suggest ways to avoid it. This
kind of retrospective analysis is great for theory construction, but
provides no comparative basis for accepting or rejecting the theory. For
example, is the lack of evidence that NASA managers formed a cohesive
in-group when they approved the Challenger launch a good reason
to drop or revise the theory? Or does my report of extensive ‘‘due
diligence" of New Era invalidate the claim that groupthink was a reason
so many people fell for the fraud?

Janis thought it
made sense to test the groupthink hypothesis in the laboratory prior to
trying to prove it in the field.19 His suggestion is curious, however,
because a minimal test of his theory that controls for the antecedent
conditions shown on the left side of Figure 18.2 would require over 7000
willing participants.20 As it is, the few reported groupthink
experiments have tended to focus on cohesiveness—a quality that’s hard
to create in the laboratory. The results are mixed at best. Janis’s
quantitative study of nineteen international crises is problematic as
well. When he and two co-authors linked positive outcomes with
high-quality decision-making procedures during international crises,
they never assessed the cohesiveness of the groups in charge.21

You may never be
a power broker on the international scene, but you could check out the
effects of high cohesiveness in groups close to home. I suggest you
gauge the desire for consensus in your family, fraternity or sorority,
church group, team, or organizational committee. Then watch for the
symptoms Janis described.

Even though there
doesn’t seem to be a definitive way to prove Janis’s theory right (or
wrong), his concept of groupthink continues to capture the imagination
of those who have seen close-knit groups make terrible decisions. After
being ridiculed as a sky-is-falling alarmist, Thiokol engineer George
McDonald could only say that launching the Challenger would be
‘‘an act away from goodness." As subsequent events made clear, so is the
process of groupthink.

Questions to
Sharpen Your Focus

1.Janis defines groupthink as a
consensus-seeking tendency. What alternative terms would you use to
describe the same group phenomenon?

2.Suppose your instructor leads a discussion about
whether communication theory should be a required course for majors.
Which of the eight symptoms of groupthink do you think would
emerge? Why?

3.Risk
may be irrelevant to those who share an illusion of invulnerability22
(‘‘These things happen, but not to people like us"). Do you think that
groupthink explains the continued high rate of the sexual transmission
of AIDS?

4.What other theories covered in earlier chapters are
consistent with Janis’s groupthink hypothesis? Can you spot five
parallels?